Why is my DVD Output grainy?

Newfields wrote on 11/19/2003, 10:13 AM
My DVD output is much granier than the original footage taken by my Sony DTR38 MiniDV camera.

Even the previews look grainy and pixelated. Is there some sort of compression or converting of my footage going on when I capture it to Vegas? If so, how do I stop this from happening?

The thought occurred that the captured video is being converted to a different resolution (720x480?).

I am burning the DVD with the default DV NTSC MPEG-2 setting.

Any help is GREATLY appreciated!

Tim

Comments

pelladon wrote on 11/20/2003, 9:16 AM
do you have screen captures?
DGrob wrote on 11/20/2003, 10:14 AM
It soulnds like you're getting a recompression of your mpeg compressed render. That happened to me when I'd burn a Vegas render with Nero, for example. Try rendering your project to an .avi file and importing that media into your DVD application. The application should then "transcode" (Nerospeak) your file and burn. DGrob
BillyBoy wrote on 11/20/2003, 2:01 PM
Actually the term "transcode" isn't unique to Nero. The more general use is to indicate taking the source of one file type like AVI and converting or "transcoding" it into another like MPEG or the other way around.
Mandk wrote on 11/20/2003, 2:21 PM
You may have already done this but after you specify the MPEG-2 default you need to specify the output quality on the video tab of the custom settings.

I missed this by thinking I had specified high quality everywhere only to find one more place to so specify.
farss wrote on 11/20/2003, 11:34 PM
Two things to look for:

1) Bitrate
2) Quality of source.

If the source is noisy or grainy then mpeg encoding will make it worse.
I suspect going to lower bitrates makes this even worse.

One way around this is to apply gaussian blur or if you can afford the render time Median. Apply in VERY small amounts and test the results on a VERY small section.

For poor quality footage I find TMPGEnc does a better job than the MC encoder. Good quality footage I cannot pick the difference.